Free and low-cost things to do in Williamsburg

Main menu

Post navigation

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

Williamsburg has lots of ghosts. There’s no shortage of ghost tours here, especially in October, but they’re still offered in the winter, too. To keep it fresh, Colonial Williamsburg offeres different types of tours. For example, I went to one once where we went inside three buildings and heard three stories based on actual events.

The Tavern Ghost Tour I took a couple of weeks ago, though, had more like a half a dozen stories, and we didn’t go inside. This tour was all about the hauntings that modern people have experience, not about the dead historical figures doing the haunting. As such, our guide was in modern clothes, and all the stories were about incidents that had ahppened to tavern managers, tour guides, security guards, and guests. To me, that made it all the more scary, because you could easily picture the creepy stuff happening to you! The eeriest thing to me was when she told us about people’s heads not showing up in photos taken in front of the Peyton Randolph House. That freaked me out a little. The ghosts weren’t limited to the colonial era, either- apparently there is a Civil War couple and a shopkeeper from the 1930s who have never left downtown . . .

A note about tickets:We tried to go by the Lumber House on the Palace Green beforehand to buy tickets, but it was closed. I guess maybe it has reduced hours for the winter season. Anyway, it turned out to be no problem, because we were able to buy tickets at Shields Tavern, where the tour started.The regular price is $12, but with your Good Neighbor Pass, it should be $7 or 8. When we presented our pass and asked for the 25% discount available to GNP holders, the tour guide said she thought that made the price the same as a child’s ticket ($7), which is what we ended up paying.

If you’d like to go, it’s called the Tavern Ghost Walk and it looks to be offered every Friday & Saturday until the end of February. There’s also a Ghosts Amongst Us tour offered weekends in February, but I haven’t been on it- if you go, let me know what it’s like!

Afterward, why not stop by the Williamsburg Lodge bar for an Old Stitch? At the bar (not the restaurant), they have some decently-priced food. On Fridays, the Timeline Jazz Quartet performs (starting at 8), and if it’s Saturday, you can catch Jocelyn Oldham playing acoustic covers in her own sweet, easy style start at 7pm.